In March 2020, life shut down, and many couples found themselves with a little extra time on their hands. Some of them welcomed a new member of the family nine months later, and those COVID babies are now getting old enough for kindergarten—and the geography of American family life has been indelibly changed in the meantime.
Highlights
- Compared to their 2019 population levels, the 20 states that voted for former vice-President Kamala Harris in 2024 saw a decline in people in their 20s and kids under 10. Post This
- States with cheaper housing tend to have better luck attracting or keeping parents of young kids. The majority of these states are politically red. Post This
- For states that want to remain attractive to families, it’s vital to focus on the fundamentals of good governance—affordable housing, solid job growth, and the political center rather than either extreme. Post This
As the Institute for Family Studies has highlighted, red states have higher birth rates than blue states. Red states also have seen higher rates of in-migration from other states than blue states in the years following the pandemic. There is clearly an increasing correlation between a state’s partisan valence and rates of family formation. We are seeing a kind of “big sort” of American families, which can help us predict where children will and won’t be seen and heard through the next decade.